PHP in 2022

https://stitcher.io/blog/php-in-2022

by headalgorithm • 5 years ago

302 301 5 years ago

stitcher.io

jbverschoor2• 5 years ago

Won’t be long before php is java

ragnot• 5 years ago

More like COBOL honestly

fleetfox• 5 years ago

Hopefully it's closer to Kotlin or TypeScript

emteycz• 5 years ago

It's not. It's a mess of OOP mind-castles, very much like Java used to be before streams. Nothing to do with the excellent typed functional-ish programming model of TS or Kotlin.

The_Colonel7• 5 years ago

You mean the most successful enterprise language and 2nd/3rd most used language overall?

TBH, I don't think PHP is going in that direction.

jbverschoor2• 5 years ago

No, just in terms of features and syntax. Too bad you can't remove all the bad stuff from php, or any old tech.

This was one of my requests to that new search engine posted here a few days ago.. Filter on minimum version of technology. Should actually just be a field in stackexchange.. packages/languages references + version. And a marker to set if the information is obsolete.

stemc433• 5 years ago

use swoole/openswoole with php - async away.

samsaga2• 5 years ago

Enums with functions. WTF

jpgvm• 5 years ago

Enums are just special classes no? Why can't they have functions defined on them?

TacoSteemers• 5 years ago

Java enums also have functions. If they didn't we would need to write separate helper classes.

Can you give a reason why we should not have them?

kaba06• 5 years ago

Java enums are essentially an in-built singleton pattern where only the given entries can exist. They are not necessarily analogous with sum types, even though rust sort of washes the two together.

tempodox• 5 years ago

It's not unreasonable to group functions with the type they operate on.

djxfade• 5 years ago

Many languages has functions in Enums. They are just a specialized Class/Struct. Rust, Swift and Java among many languages has this.

qaq• 5 years ago

Cool to see it's still kicking and making major improvements

m4l3x2• 5 years ago

I was a php developer for some time two years ago, before switching to go.

I was mainly solving high performance parallel processing and distributed problems.

There are things like ReactPHP which are an awesome achievement, but still every lib you use needs to be developed for ReactPHP.

After learning about go and goroutines I only find it painful to solve these problems in PHP, even using ReactPHP.

jhgb3• 5 years ago

So you switched from a language X not designed to do Q to a language Y designed to do Q, presumably because language Y didn't exist when you started doing Q. I imagine that happens all the time, but seldom is it a fault of X. But what I find puzzling is why PHP, of all things, was your choice for these kinds of problems before Go appeared.

edoceo3• 5 years ago

Isn't Go like 10 years old now?

mountainriver• 5 years ago

Yeah not sure why anyone would use PHP nowadays, you can be as productive and more efficient in Go.

Plus you can build just about anything with Go! Whereas PHP is pretty strictly for web development.

mojuba6• 5 years ago

Is it just me or PHP's evolution is a bit "too little, too late" for an almost 30-years old language?

PHP is not a likable language but it's probably not going away any time soon. Its concept of "one endpoint is one script" is one of its biggest killer features that no other language has been able to deploy in such an accessible manner. Well, Perl and old-style CGI aside, of course.

That, and also the fact that it may be pretty much the only dynamic language in use today with ARC and not a GC. Funny how PHP devs are often unaware of this.

Anyway I wish the language at least evolved faster and we wouldn't wait for 8.0 to have global `const` definitions instead of the archaic `define()` for example.

dskloet3• 5 years ago

Slow change is good for small projects that you want to build once and use for decades without much maintenance.

mojuba6• 5 years ago

A language that uses archaic syntax with dollar vars, semicolons, is pretty verbose itself may die before it evolves into something sensible. Not that I believe PHP will die any time soon, but just replying to your "slow is good".

arenaninja2• 5 years ago

Isn't ARC over a GC evident in PHP with its opcode cache? I don't think I have run into a PHP dev who thinks PHP has a GC

thinkindie2• 5 years ago

the very fact that you don't have to think about memory management it means that there is something else taking care of it. Call it GC or otherwise, no PHP dev will be think about memory management at all, unless they are building some long-lived, large data processing

aeno• 5 years ago

PHP uses a garbage collector since version 5.3 that was released around 2009/2010.

mojuba6• 5 years ago

(Repeating myself) PHP's garbage collector is ARC.

heurisko6• 5 years ago

Its concept of "one endpoint is one script" is one of its biggest killer features that no other language has been able to deploy in such an accessible manner.

I don't see that as its biggest killer feature. In fact most projects built on PHP using a framework won't use the feature, as every request will be routed through a front controller. This has been true for at least a decade.

I think the killer feature of PHP is its shared-nothing architecture, tear-down at every request (or every x requests if you're using php-fpm) which has proved remarkably successful as it is so resilient.

egeozcan5• 5 years ago

It's a blessing and a curse. Makes it amazingly easy to start with, which is how many PHP developers started (with perhaps folder root index.php rewrites and that's it), but later it makes it confusing, especially if "it always worked" for you, when you want to do dynamic routing.

I see the same pain for some next.js devs these days, even though it does allow parameters in roues in [name].js file form, I saw some people generating routers from file trees and finding it an acceptable compromise. Well, each to their own, I guess.

sidkshatriya2• 5 years ago

I think the killer feature of PHP is its shared-nothing architecture, tear-down at every request (or every x requests if you're using php-fpm) which has proved remarkably successful as it is so resilient.

I agree. Shared nothing is definitely the killer feature.

Even if php-fpm is tear down at every x requests, each request still starts afresh in which each needed PHP file is required and loaded again. This is not slow because of opcode caching means that parsing etc. does not need to be done afresh. PHP just pulls from the opcode cache. At the end of the request the request is torn down. The interpreter instance might be reused again for performance (though that may be torn down every x request also as you implied with php-fpm for instance).

When you want to find out why something did not work in PHP you just need to go back to the start of the request and work your way from here. With a stateful system like Django (Python) or nodejs (JavaScript) you need to worry about the state of the full server in addition to what happen in a specific request.

This is an ideal model of course because large PHP implementations uses caching (in things like redis) to speed things up and the cached state could be the one introducing a bug. However, in practice, PHP tries to put in most of the state in a relational db so debugging a PHP script is much simpler due to this shared nothing feature.

moneywoes• 5 years ago

Could you elaborate on the shared-nothing architecture?

mschuster915• 5 years ago

Is it just me or PHP's evolution is a bit "too little, too late" for an almost 30-years old language?

No. While PHP won't be the language of choice for academia or some new hipster startup that wants to woo junior engineers with the promise of "we're using the latest cool shit", the trio of PHP, Java and .NET with their associated ecosystems has managed the fine balance of evolution speed between uprooting everything on the regular (like NodeJS which went through at least three major build toolings with zero compatibility and the Javascript language itself with at least four ways of creating modules) and becoming a live fossil (like Perl) pretty well.

egeozcan5• 5 years ago

A typical Java project has way more complexity (and confusion and sadness and pain) than your typical node.js project in the enterprise world. I have stomach cramps thinking about the stuff my eyes have seen. .NET is not innocent either.

For PHP, just look at the Drupal, Joomla and Wordpress codebases to see how many ways there are to include files. For a current example, see the hate Laravel receives on how it does DI from Symfony-likers. There's also the Laminas (Zen) crowd going all-Java.

If something is popular, there WILL be many ways to do the same thing. Look at how Python is evolving.

Isinlor4• 5 years ago

There is a garbage collection:

https://www.php.net/manual/en/features.gc.php

This section explains the merits of the new Garbage Collection (also known as GC) mechanism that is part of PHP 5.3.
First of all, the whole reason for implementing the garbage collection mechanism is to reduce memory usage by cleaning up circular-referenced variables as soon as the prerequisites are fulfilled. In PHP's implementation, this happens as soon as the root-buffer is full, or when the function gc_collect_cycles() is called. In the graph below, we display the memory usage of the script below, in both PHP 5.2 and PHP 5.3, excluding the base memory that PHP itself uses when starting up.

mojuba6• 5 years ago

PHP's garbage collector is ARC, unlike any other dynamic language that I know of.

ARC is more performant but can introduce memory leaks via circular references, which is probably not a big problem for short-lived scripts anyway.

viraptor2• 5 years ago

pretty much the only dynamic language in use today with ARC and not a GC

Python uses RC, with GC available but only used for cycles.

swalsh• 5 years ago

The big guys, who know what they're doing use PHP because it makes devops stupid simple. Throw it on the server, its ready. That's always been PHP's killer feature.

snov5• 5 years ago

Is it? Last time I used PHP (around 5.x-7.x) it was exactly the other way around. For production you needed php-fpm, nginx, opcode cache... it was a nightmare compared with go or even java. Is it better now?

dagw2• 5 years ago

Its concept of "one endpoint is one script" is one of its biggest killer features

Is that still a thing in PHP world? I recently ended up working on a 'modern' PHP project using Laravel and it was all routers and views and models and auto-generated scaffolding code, just like Rails and Django. There was no sign left of that 'old' approach.

9dev5• 5 years ago

It's not. You usually hear that kind of reasoning exclusively from people that last interacted with PHP decades ago.

toast0• 5 years ago

There's a lot of popular examples of more or less abandoning the old ways, but the old ways still work.

I'm of the strong opinion that modern PHP with frameworks and auto-include and a ton of modelling is the wrong way to do it, but everyone else can do it that way, and I can still do things the old way and I can be happy.

PHP has this amazingly zen model of computing. At the end of the request, everything is thrown away to start fresh. This means anything you don't output is garbage. I don't think it makes a lot of sense to make sculptural models of your data and page structure only to throw them away. It's best to keep things simple.

There's some times and places where it makes sense to use more features, but starting with a kitchen sink framework makes it very hard to get simple where it's needed, but you can always pull in a little bit of something more complex into a simple thing.

bluetomcat• 5 years ago

In its early years up until around 2006, PHP was mostly "HTML on steroids", that is, an HTML preprocessor with lots of goodies like "batteries-included" DB access, form handling, image processing, text processing, all accessed via a single Apache module. You simply rename your .html file to .php, and put some magic between "<?php" and "?>".

Then came along templating engines like Smarty, and they introduced a new templating language for a language that was already built for templating. For some reason, "<?= $foo ?>" was considered much worse than "{$foo}".

hparadiz4• 5 years ago

It was one of the first freely available languages that allowed you to do image manipulation so sites like DeviantArt would use it.

ehnto3• 5 years ago

For some reason, "<?= $foo ?>" was considered much worse than "{$foo}".

A stigma that remains to this day, even though the spec is very clear about those kinds of short tags and the flags that affect them. PHP developers are absolutely terrified that some imaginary environment flag they have control over is going to brick their application, but are happy to bring in an entirely new templating language as a dependency instead. I'm sure Smarty was borne of a need, but I was never sure what it brought to the table except different tags for existing features.

tannhaeuser• 5 years ago

That's exactly what has puzzled me for a long time: a language with HTML templating as unique selling point needs a templating "engine" after all?

smarty.net has a pamphlet up there where pros/cons (but actually only pros) are discussed [1]. Failing to understand that "<?php ...>" syntax is a SGML processing instruction with well-defined ways to embed into a hosting markup language like HTML, they go even so far as to say

Another issue with PHP tags is that they share the <> characters of HTML tags. In the application code this isn't an issue, but mixed with HTML, <?php ?> tags are a maddening process to tell them apart from the HTML tags. This also blurs the line between application and presentation separation since any PHP logic can be injected into a template.

Yeah no, now you need new escaping syntax if you ever wanted to have verbatim {$whatever} in your HTML.

Notably missing is a discussion about HTML-aware, injection-free templating such as for preventing {$bla} expanding into <script>alert('Pwnd')</script> when sourced from user input, which is what SGML and other HTML-aware template engines can do, and which in the name of everything that's holy should've been implemented in PHP 2 to save the web from becoming a botnet.

[1] https://www.smarty.net/syntax_comparison

pjmlp2• 5 years ago

More funny is how developers keep being unware that ARC is a GC algorithm implementation.

Then they tell learning CS theory is not required.

mojuba6• 5 years ago

I do know ARC is also a garbage collector, but is there an agreed name for the other GC's? There is a significant difference and performance implications with ARC vs. the other ones, that's what I meant.

Aeolun2• 5 years ago

I think that’s my biggest problem having moved from PHP to Typescript. I just expect my language to have certain features now, and while PHP is catching up, it still isn’t there yet.

And even if they do, what then? It’ll just be feature parity, so there’s no need to switch back either way.

throw_m2393392• 5 years ago

PHP is either a flawed scripting language for some or a "poor man's java" for others.

I had to learn JEE(JSP,JSF,CDi,JPA) for some project lately, so now I understand a bit more why Doctrine, Synfony and co are the way they are, coming from Go, Ruby, Python and JS... Well I prefer just writing some JEE stuff rather than using a PHP framework in that case, because I realized the Java cargo culting was just insane in the PHP community and how PHP is poorly equipped to replicate that JEE stack...

PHP isn't going away though, billions of PHP scripts out there to maintain, and CMS are built in PHP mostly because of hosting providers still defaulting to Apache servers because cost.

Nothing is too little too late though, when I read about the evolution of Java, I realize I'm lucky to suffer through it today rather than 15 years ago...

Its concept of "one endpoint is one script" is one of its biggest killer features that no other language has been able to deploy in such an accessible manner. Well, Perl and old-style CGI aside, of course.

JSP on Tomcat works mostly the same way. and nothing prevents anybody from using python or ruby, (or C++) in FastCGI mode. PHP has that whole "templating stuff" though.

ehnto3• 5 years ago

PHP has that whole "templating stuff" though.

That might be underestimating the feature, it was very much the core proposition of the language and likely why it's so well suited for web applications.

ehnto3• 5 years ago

It's still in major use across the industry so I don't think it's too little too late. Maybe late, but not too late. I think it's pragmatism is partly why it's still so popular. No need to rush to the next best thing as PHP is perfectly capable of taking you from side-project to enterprise software with millions of users.

Zababa3• 5 years ago

That, and also the fact that it may be pretty much the only dynamic language in use today with ARC and not a GC.

Python and Perl use reference counting too. Ruby, Lua and JS (at least v8) are GC'd. PHP isn't unique in that regard.

hmottestad3• 5 years ago

PHP is my go to language for building simple backends that store data as json in a file and synchronize access using flock(...). There are a ton of cheap hosting providers that support PHP and all you have do to is copy your files over and everything works.

I love to focus my energy on building a great frontend with React or Vue.

dskloet3• 5 years ago

In the past I built a few things on Google App Engine. Honestly one of my greatest regrets in life. I ported a few to PHP so I won't get screwed again when I need to change hosting provider. Still need to port some and am dreading doing it but it will be for the better.

cube00• 5 years ago

It's a shame companies, especially large ones with strategic architecture teams who should know better, haven't identified the short term cost savings of using cloud provider specific services is not worth the long term cost of vendor lock in.

thraxil• 5 years ago

Huh. I deploy a lot of stuff to GAE and love it. But my approach is to just write regular Django apps, add a half dozen lines of GAE-specific stuff to the settings and that's it. No trouble at all running the same apps somewhere else with only trivial changes. That's worked really well for me for work where we're already on GCP and GAE lets us run our lower traffic services reliably for very little money.

g19fanatic• 5 years ago

You have any good simple examples of your backend? Sounds like what I've been attempting to explain to others. How many concurrent requests and what size of data can you run with a setup as described?

dncornholio6• 5 years ago

Storing stuff in a json file sounds horrible to me. Why would you want that?

hmottestad3• 5 years ago

Because you asked I got around to publishing it on Github: https://github.com/HASMAC-AS/LightStore

nerdponx3• 5 years ago

I've wondered why there's no JSON-based equivalent of SQLite, like "MongoDB but it's just a file and a library."

Spivak3• 5 years ago

I think because SQLite ate that market with the JSON extension. I've also seen LMDB used in the wild.

ihateolives• 5 years ago

But ... SQLite is "just a file and a library".

dehrmann2• 5 years ago

PHP gets a lot of criticism for its legacy of behind hacked together. One thing that does get as much criticism, and one reason I avoid it for even simple things, is since it's request-based, it doesn't have a good story for connection pooling. While working on a former employer's PHP SDK, I had to add proxy hooks to it, then document how to set up Apache or Nginx as a proxy so you can get outbound connection pooling. If you depend on any third-party APIs, this can be a big deal for performance.

deergomoo• 5 years ago

Doesn’t PHP-FPM handle pooling? Perhaps we’re talking about different things

f311a5• 5 years ago

It's still a language that's mainly used for web development, right?

Modern websites in big companies require pretty complex backends that require data processing queues and other background activities. Can PHP compete with languages such as Go, Python or Ruby in the future?

vaylian• 5 years ago

Why shouldn't PHP be able to compete here? I personally prefer Python over PHP for stylistic reasons but I have no doubt that PHP is capable of doing the same things as Python, even if the syntax looks a bit more outdated.

f311a5• 5 years ago

Because it wasn't designed for long-running processes or data processing at first. It evolved a lot, but I don't see it outside of simple backends for websites.

cies8• 5 years ago

Can PHP compete with languages such as Go, Python or Ruby in the future?

No. I expect no seriously large projects are started in PHP anymore.

bovermyer• 5 years ago

I'll take this comment as a genuinely curious inquiry instead of the veiled insult that others seem to be taking it as.

PHP is primarily used for web development, yes. That doesn't preclude it from offline processing, however. It's quite nice for quick file processing scripts.

Modern websites do not necessarily require complex backends. It depends on the site and its purpose. A minimal static site is just as modern as an ecommerce behemoth. Or are you using "modern" as a synonym for "complex?"

PHP can compete with languages such as Go, Python, or Ruby in the right circumstances. PHP has a vibrant ecosystem that Go cannot (yet?) match. It has a different feel that may appeal to people that dislike Python's syntax. It can also compare quite well with Ruby, though Ruby on Rails and PHP on Laravel are almost similar enough to make that contest a wash.

9dev5• 5 years ago

To provide an actual data point: I successfully built one of the largest messaging APIs using PHP. We had a horizontally (and dynamically) scalable architecture, ran hundreds of worker nodes in Kubernetes, that processed thousands of messages per second. The nice things about PHP were:

* Interoperability with the rest of our ecosystem, including the web platform: We could share code and install modules in all projects

* Availability of packages: For lots of common use cases, there are high-quality libraries available, such as process forking, socket communication, or message queues

* Easy to go from PoC to production: Start out with no-brainer arrays, then move to typed data structures easily

I find all the syntax critique on PHP to be completely irrelevant. It's a high-performance, dynamically typed scripting language. I can build the same things in it as with Go, Python or TypeScript, but the ecosystem is stable, tweaking it for production is easy, and it goes from "shoddy hackathon script" to "fully typed, production-grade application" smoothly. There's a single, pretty great package manager; type checking, although limited, works at runtime; code doesn't need to be compiled prior to running. All this makes it a good choice even for big projects to me.

arenaninja2• 5 years ago

enums in PHP! I've been waiting a long time for this

cies8• 5 years ago

And now you can wait for them to be used by (std) libs. This kind of features are hard to bolt on later on.

cletus• 5 years ago

I'm a fan of PHP and have been for years for several reasons:

1. Low barrier to entry;

2. Hard to leak resources since the model is to tear down everything after a request finishes;

3. Stateless API core which means the efforts of creating an environment for a request for (2) is extremely low. Compare this to, say, the bootstrap time for Python or Java (which is why those generally don't follow the request teardown model);

4. Almost no multithreading.

This makes it great for servicing HTTP requests IMHO.

I need to compare it to Hack/HHVM though since I used that for years and it's still playing catch up with features Hack has had for years eg:

1. Hack has had the async-await model for years;

2. The type system is actually really good. It made me appreciate how nullability being part of the type system is incredibly useful. Plus it's had generics for years; and

3. Better inbuilt collection types with less odd coercion behaviour (ie dict, keyset, vec).

I find PHP hate in 2022 to be tired. Look at something like Laravel and PHP is completely fine. The sins of the past and even the odd inconsistencies still left in the language (eg needle and haystack param ordering) don't really matter.

viraptor2• 5 years ago

Compare this to, say, the bootstrap time for Python or Java

The bootstrap time for a request exists only in a web framework, not in the language. And since you can have the extremes of pure fastcgi or uwsgi, or full Django, you need a more specific comparison.

moring• 5 years ago

Java has a high bootstrap time for the JVM. PHP doesn't have that, but the "tear down everything" model might imply a high bootstrap time depending on the framework, because things need to be bootstrapped per request that are already there in Java.

alanwreath• 5 years ago

I think the problem of PHP is the amount of old tutorials/solutions/conventions/etc. Maybe this is the direction all languages take. Eventually the only way to separate yourself from the past is to sever the name link so as to remove the confusion when trying to learn the modern way of interfacing with the language.

Having used Laravel I did feel that was the best version of PHP I had ever used, which while great, each time I use it, I still feel encumbered. It could just be the workflows that PHP provides don’t/haven’t meshed well with the type of endeavors I’ve tried to approach. Or maybe the language just carries too much history.

As an undergrad I made the mistake of attempting to use php solve some bioinformatics homework and ended up reimplementing the k-means algorithm. While that example may be more revealing of my ineptitude for data science it broaches the topic of “where does a language provide the right primitives for the work at hand?” And if the web is changing, is it still appropriate to use a language designed around a previous version of the web?

np_tedious• 5 years ago

It seems that PHP (or at least the community) is taking a lot of inspiration from hack for its newer additions, and giving very little in the way of credit or comparisons.

It is weird than an article like this shows nothing for ctrl+f "hack"

sodapopcan3• 5 years ago

I agree that PHP hate is pretty boring. Nothing beats being able to FTP a few files to deploy a simple dynamic webpage. I still use it for that. But when it comes to building large web apps, I moved on years ago. While I have seen there have been a ton of improvements with some really nice frameworks, there is nothing so crazy innovating about any of it that would make me care to switch back.

cntainer5• 5 years ago

I started my career in PHP ~15 years ago trying to do OOP in PHP 4.x. That was "fun".

In the meantime I switched to other stacks but I've been keeping a distant eye on how PHP was evolving and I still am involved with PHP projects to a certain degree, though rarely at code level.

I really appreciate the effort put into fixing most of the things I hated about the language, though at times it felt like the language and some of the frameworks were trying too hard to copy the Java ecosystem, all while Java itself was starting to modernize.

I'm curious what is the value proposition of the latest PHP version(s). Why would I choose PHP when starting a greenfield project? I know one of the easiest answers is that there's a huge amount of developers worldwide that know PHP, but apart from this obvious reason is there anything else that would make someone choose PHP ahead of other stacks?

kijin4• 5 years ago

There are definitely parts of PHP and its ecosystem that have been trying to copy Java. On the flip side, PHP is quite similar to Java when it comes to its value proposition, so I can appreciate why the devs have chosen that path. Like Java, PHP is stable and slow-moving. It takes backward compatibility seriously, and it has a huge community. PHP is to small-time "webmasters" and lifestyle businesses what Java is to governments and large corporations.

If you want to build something once and get passive income out of it for the better part of a decade, PHP has your back. Pinboard is a prime example of this business model.

If you're a fast-moving startup who will replace your entire codebase every six months, you might be better served by JS.

cies8• 5 years ago

Why would one pick PHP over Java except because "you already know PHP"?

If you're a fast-moving startup who will replace your entire codebase every six months, you might be better served by JS.

Noooooo... :)

cies8• 5 years ago

Why would I choose PHP when starting a greenfield project?

Because you don't know better. If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

Ruby + Rails is miles ahead of PHP + Laravel. If you want more static typing (which I currently believe is a good thing) I really like Kotlin (+ KTor or + Javalin). If you are okay without OO and like static typing Haskell + IHP is pretty complete. If you are okay with learning about low-level stuff, Rust + Actix is really nice.

All of this may require learning new things, and coming from PHP that's a good thing. PHP and JavaScript are not languages that help you become a better programmer. They are messy and lack important features (sum-types).

christophilus3• 5 years ago

You can write JavaScript via Typescript, and you now have one of the best and most popular languages there is (including sum types). There are still a lot of warts, but it’s actually a really nice language IMO.

lnxg33k12• 5 years ago

Ruby + Rails is miles ahead of PHP + Laravel.

Wtf are you saying Willis.. but i guess it's a matter of preference, also consider that in PHP you can also use symfony which is my preference, but regardless of everything, you either come here with a list of things that make ruby on rails miles ahead or people is just going to classify your ideas as worthless

sidkshatriya2• 5 years ago

PHP and JavaScript are not languages that help you become a better programmer.

One can do some really beautiful programming in both modern JavaScript and modern PHP. Both these languages can and have helped millions of programmers become better programmers. Today's JavaScript and PHP are no longer the hacked up languages they once were.

ceejayoz• 5 years ago

Why would I choose PHP when starting a greenfield project?

For me, the answer is Laravel.

nerdponx3• 5 years ago

For someone who has never used PHP: what is so good about it?

cntainer5• 5 years ago

If I'm forced to choose PHP that's the choice I would also make in most cases, probably because it reminds me of some of the things I liked about Rails.

heurisko6• 5 years ago

I'm curious what is the value proposition of the latest PHP version(s).

I think more and more people have started to realise that typed languages make better, more reliable software. The incremental additions to PHP's type system are just a move towards this, I think and can be seen in other languages such as Typescript.

I'm just not a fan of dynamically typed languages anymore, even for small scripts.

Why would I choose PHP when starting a greenfield project?

I think it depends on your greenfield project, but there are many domains where problems are just solved related to e-commerce or shuffling around content online.

To this point, PHP benefits just from the fact that it has been around for so long, and will continue to be supported far into the future.

Many PHP frameworks like Symfony have LTS releases that will ensure software is supported years into the future, with strong support from agencies.

chefandy3• 5 years ago

I think that says more about your particular mental model of programming than about programming in general. In the couple of decades I’ve been coding, I’ve seen good use of both dynamically/weakly-typed and strongly typed languages.

Sure— thinking you’re going to save time writing more complex applications by avoiding boilerplate is flatly wrong. However, if boilerplate would be a double-digit percentage of your code, you probably will save time avoiding it because any unlikely dynamic typing issues will be easily resolved. But if it’s small enough to be inconsequential and you’re in the typed-language zone, why not use your typed language, anyway?

Avoid dogma and use the right tool for the job, I say.

cutler3• 5 years ago

This static-for-everything trend is absurd. Compiling one-off scripts? Give me a break - they're not called scripting languages for nothing.

Isinlor4• 5 years ago

Share-nothing architecture, good, stable ecosystem build around Composer, Laravel and Symfony and as you said a lot of devs.

Otherwise, I think differences in syntax etc. are rather subjective and everyone has their preferences. For example, I really like PHP "arrays" because it removes cognitive load of choosing between different data structures. When writing business rules 90% of time I don't really care about optimization or memory, but about readability and communication.

Overall, PHP is rather dumb language and I love it for being dumb.

Python package management currently is a nightmare, but projects like Poetry seem on a good track to make it better. JavaScript is better than Python at package management, but it has issues with many small packages maintained by random people. Java ecosystem also seems quite a lot more complex, especially when you compare Composer and Maven. Compilation aspect also changes the way you work.

I have no experience with Ruby, C#, .NET etc.

agumonkey2• 5 years ago

I seems to me that php/js/python will have a large consolidation in the next decade.

cntainer5• 5 years ago

I can agree with the share-nothing architecture as a good selling point that keeps things simple but there are use cases where this is actually a limitation.

Parts of the community seem to want to go over that limitation so things like Swoole and Roadrunner were developed. I guess it's interesting to have both options available even though much of the ecosystem won't readily function in both contexts.

While the ecosystem seems a bit weaker that what I would expect considering the number of developers (comparing to Java, Ruby, Python) I don't have a strong opinion on package management. I feel like all major platforms have gotten into pretty good shape on this front. Like you mentioned, if I start a new Python project I can just choose Poetry and avoid most of the drama.

elondaits• 5 years ago

Why would I choose PHP when starting a greenfield project?

LAMP stacks are super ubiquitous, open source, cross-platform, and in many cases to deploy your app you don't need to configure anything, add any modules or dependencies... just copy your files in place. A small project (e.g. contact form with a CAPTCHA) could be just a small file named whatever you want, which you can place anywhere in the public directory, and it'll work.

If you don't want to maintain the server you can get a managed VPS and things will probably run and continue to run for years without any intervention on your part, even through software updates.

... The exception is that PHP breaks backwards compatibility often, but even then most hosting services let you choose between different PHP versions which they'll maintain for a while. Installing older versions from package managers is very easy as well.

That said, I don't think this is a strong reason to use PHP in most projects. I do think it could be one of the strongest ones to justify its use in some specific projects.

cntainer5• 5 years ago

Haven't thought of this, I guess for some people it makes sense especially for small, personal projects. I'm more biased towards startups with a plan to grow or larger projects.

In my case if the hosting provider doesn't have something like DigitalOcean's droplets I'll still rely on docker compose instead of the default stack deployed on the system whatever stack I'm choosing. But yeah that's raising the bar too much for most people especially for a couple of scripts or pages.

phphphphp2• 5 years ago

php is my language of choice, I love modern php, but I struggle with the same question. As a language, I think php is great, and for a solo project it is an obvious choice for me because of my proficiency and the quality of the language... but would I start a greenfield project with php? No.

I've worked across a variety of different companies and a consistent theme is the existence of "php developers" in these companies, and the bad quality software they produce. I'm currently working at a company (founded within the last 5 years) and their php codebase is AWFUL (no structure, 1k+ LOC methods, no tests, no ci, no documentation etc.)[1].

The problem is not php, it's that a lot of PHP developers are doing the same thing they did 10 years ago, despite the industry having moved on. As a Software Engineer, I think there's a very valid case for php over Ruby or Python or Node, however as a CTO or a team lead, I'd really, really struggle to justify it, which pains me to say. If you're trying to hire php developers, you'll be hiring a lot of people who haven't changed how they work since the late 2000s. I'd rather hire code school graduates to write Ruby than a php developer with a decade of experience.

[1] People can write bad code anywhere, but pre-historic php is especially terrible. A company with bad golang is an order of magnitude more penetrable than a company with bad php.

cntainer5• 5 years ago

I completely agree with this but I avoided mentioning it as I wanted to get some objective technical answers, decoupled from any of the usual operational concerns: number of people, mindset of people, seniority, etc.

I think the main cause is the low barrier for entry. It's great that anyone can get started quickly and be successful but it also means that the resulting mess can be at a level that you rarely see in other stacks where the barrier for entry is a bit higher.

I can clearly see that the PHP ecosystem is there (mature libraries for mocks, tests, etc) but like you said, there are people that just don't care. The language and ecosystem evolved faster than a big chunk of the developer community and I don't think everybody will catch-up anytime soon, as old PHP code bases can still generate a nice revenue doing maintenance.

lordgroff• 5 years ago

I mean value proposition specifically to the latest version? Some syntax improvements here and there, nothing big.

The value proposition *is* the ecosystem. Do I prefer coding Python to PHP? Sure (although it's not night and day difference by any stretch of imagination). Do I prefer Laravel or Django? Laravel. Do I prefer WordPress or ....? Actually, there's no equivalent, it's the one ton gorilla in that space.

When it comes to the 'classical' web (but also fun new toys like Laravel Livewire), there's very little that can compete with PHP as far as I'm concerned and the IMHO minor warts are certainly not worth losing the ecosystem for.

lelanthran• 5 years ago

Why would I choose PHP when starting a greenfield project?

Ease? I have not professionally used php since php4, and last set it up in php5.x.

Last night I wanted to send some data to an http server, a small payload of json, that would be saved into a DB and queried later. Took me all of 5m to realise that my php test script that receives the file can be copied over to my el-cheapo webhost account unchanged and work fine.

No extra "database" modules to download, then install on a host I've no shell access to, sending email worked out the box, etc.

Php reduces the friction. I remember trying to use Python for something (with Django, I think) in 2011 and it was absolute hell to get deployed onto my webhost; fingers burned, I won't touch it again.

Php is basically batteries included, and works everywhere. I'm sure the Python, Node or Ruby alternatives are elegant, and neat, etc ... but if I wanted that, it means the project is expected to be large-ish, and for anything more than a few thousand lines of code I'm switching to a compiled language.

xigoi3• 5 years ago

If you use CGI, you can have it just as easy with any language.

kijin4• 5 years ago

Syntax sugar is nice. It helps PHP sidestep the age-old criticism about its crappy API, although the crappy API is still there if you want to use it.

What's really great about PHP these days is the development environment. Composer is a rock-solid package manager. Most frameworks and important libraries are gravitating toward shared standards defined by PSRs. Thanks to those shared standards, the APIs are stable and easy to understand. There's no colors/faker/left-pad drama. Everything just works out of the box and keeps on working. Everything is extensively documented. And somehow the runtime keeps getting faster without breaking backward compatibility.

mschuster915• 5 years ago

There's no colors/faker/left-pad drama.

Yet. Composer packages have the same attack surface as NPM packages, the only thing that is different is that there are (outside of frameworks like Drupal and Symfony) no automated post-install scripts that get executed during a "composer install".

The fundamental difference is that lots of what is popular in the NPM world isn't needed in the Composer world at all due to PHP's extensive stdlib (meaning, less people having to maintain trivialities like left-pad and thus less potential for people to get hacked/sell out/get burned out in frustration).

Furthermore, most highly popular PHP projects have extensive corporate, consulting or foundational backing - Symfony, Drupal, PHPUnit, Laravel, Typo3, MediaWiki, Wordpress to name the biggest players - and each of these provides to developers what the stdlib is missing, so there are strict QA and release procedures to prevent a repeat of the current colors/faker events.

kijin4• 5 years ago

Totally agreed. Despite PHP's reputation as a beginner-oriented, haphazardly designed language, the ecosystem as a whole feels much more mature and well-organized with multiple stakeholders and strong safeguards.

revskill3• 5 years ago

Javascript is what PHP should be since day 1.

cies8• 5 years ago

Javascript is what PHP should be since day 1.

ReasonML or ReScript is what JS should have been since day 1.

revskill3• 5 years ago

It's not fun sir. What's the point of those $$$ mark for variables ? Make no sense at all.

Easy adoption for all levels of programmers is what make it work for enterprise applications now.

christophilus3• 5 years ago

Scheme is what JS should have been since day 1.

stemc433• 5 years ago

id this why js devs rewrite everything in typescript now?

revskill3• 5 years ago

Because it's flexible and type-safe. You have both productivity and scalability on both syntax level and infrastructure level. It's suitable for 99% of programmers and the businesses for now.

dotancohen4• 5 years ago

I see that you've not used Javascript before ES6. I remember a time when the only thing worse than PHP, was Javascript.

syshum• 5 years ago

>Packagist, now with over 3 million registered versions and more than 300.000 packages

I see PHP continues to import all of the problem of npm into the PHP community, I moved away from php about the time packagist started to gain ground.

captn3m05• 5 years ago

Packagist actually gets a lots of things right that NPM gets wrong:

1. NPM has a global namespace that was shoe-horned into an organization thing later. Packagist has been namespaced since day one. Using a namespace avoids almost all of typo-squatting issues etc.

2. NPM hosts the code at its end. This means you could review some code on GitHub and it might not match the code that you get. Packagist fetches the code from GitHub (same guarantees as Go)

3. NPM: The package version is defined _inside_ the package.json file. This causes issues, because the NPM registry is not necessarily the source of truth for this data, resulting in weird edge cases, such as this bug[0]. Composer/Packagist on the other hand just syncs tags against GitHub.

4. The whole NPM ecosystem needs a whole lot of additional tooling to actually publish packages on NPM. NPM doesn't support robot accounts (PATs are not bots), so you must provide a token with complete write access to your account to your CI system, which then must build and push a package to NPM. This process being without 2FA has led to a lot of compromises. Every release also needs chores to bump the version in package.json (which doesn't have to match the version in package-lock.json). Packagist side-steps all these issues by setting a webhook on your repo (no write access needed) that can trigger a sync on Packagist end. Ideally, this should just work with an RSS feed, but webhooks are easier to build.

NPM has a lot of good ideas (ability to load multiple versions of the same package for eg), but Packagist isn't a terrible package manager - it works quite well, and you rarely see people tripping over composer like how happens with the Python ecosystem. The PHP community also prefers medium sized packages, so you don't get a thousand dependencies accidentally.

[0] https://github.blog/2021-11-15-githubs-commitment-to-npm-eco...

fart322• 5 years ago

The PHP community also prefers medium sized packages, so you don't get a thousand dependencies accidentally.

I think it was Laravel or Lumen? I tried that one once and was kinda amazed it pulled like 100 packages. In PHP ecosystem, I think that's considered a lot (to be fair, this is few years back). I've worked on fairly large projects (mostly Symfony + Doctrine and PHPUnit) and don't recall seeing so many dependencies.

Now compare this to initialization of any common JS framework starter.

hparadiz4• 5 years ago

I'm just leaving my current role, a fast growing start up with a completely custom framework. Currently at half a million active accounts but there's really no bottleneck with the PHP. Can easily keep throwing more boxes and hardware at it and I feel pretty comfy that it will be fine at 20 million active accounts. Also background jobs processing which is sort of async cause it lives on top of SQS and fires a sub process for every new message.

My iteration cycle is very fast. No need to sit there and wait for compiles. PHP is C-like and written in C so the hate is funny to me. Our code is unit tested, documented, and extremely well organized. I even connect to our database on my dev box through an SSH tunnel managed by a tool I made for us in.... PHP which uses AWS IAM to authorize a private key for 60 seconds and then auto connect. That's how I connect to our EC2 instances too.

I'm now jumping to another successful start up with a small team running Laravel. Again super organized and well documented.

simias• 5 years ago

I congratulate you on your successful projects but I don't understand what you mean by "PHP is C-like and written in C so the hate is funny to me". The language of the runtime is not particularly relevant unless you want to write custom extensions (which I remember being an absolutely atrocious experience back when I had to do in in ~2007, hopefully it improved since then) and the language itself is only very superficially C-like.

In fact the most C-like thing I remember about it is that many standard library functions where extremely thin wrappers around the libc, so thin in fact that you could get a segfault if you weren't careful.

hparadiz4• 5 years ago

Was implying it's efficient and fast. It's extremely unlikely you will ever need to write an extension.

egeozcan5• 5 years ago

PHP is C-like and written in C so the hate is funny to me.

You didn't realize how many people hate C? (Like any other popular language, yes)

deepstack2• 5 years ago

I've being used PHP since it was Personal Home Page (3.x or something). The reason I moved away from it, is it is language make up. Some point around 4 it try to become Java OO style (ok ES6 is trying to do that too). The main reason moving away from it is because would like to have language that has function as a first class citizen, and JS seems to fit the bill. Once I found the joy of developing with proper closure and using function as a first class citizen PHP just doesn't appeal to me. The best things about PHP is it's templating system. And with EJS or similar there is really no reason to use PHP anymore.

stemc433• 5 years ago

if you are working on PHP projects - dont forget to look into swoole/openswoole. all major PHP frameworks are adopting it now.

this way you can do async and build websocket servers and such and build http applications with event loop and without apache/nginx and such. etc etc

vdo2• 5 years ago

I learned to use php when I was like 14. I’m 27 now and still derive such joy when making my own little projects that will never see the light of day. I try to be humble as far as just being a php trash coder, but I don’t feel too ashamed honestly, as it is the most mainstream thing really. I will always be grateful to php for being accessible and yeah, I guess easy. I don’t know why php is the only one I really stuck with exactly, but it is weirdly dear to me. Nearly half my life I’ve never gone too far past being a lowly php coder, and not a great one at that, but I still like what I can make at the end of the day. It’s a side creative thing for me. Laravel was a revelation for me over the last few years, it just makes some things make sense that never did for me as a self-taught hobbyist.

hparadiz4• 5 years ago

I started at 16 and I'm 34. Went from working on gaming websites to running giant ERP backends for mobile apps, web apps, and api users in high throughput environments.

All I need to get to work is VSCode and some linux VM or container. PHP has an obnoxious amount of depth. You can become an expert on just ORMs or just SSO or just Collections or just routing and still be learning something new everyday. I am actually "self tought". Whatever that means.

irrational• 5 years ago

I am actually "self tought". Whatever that means.

What does that mean? I know what taught means, but tought? No idea.

jabbany• 5 years ago

I started doing my first web development with PHP (4 & later 5) around the same time! Actually ended up learning a lot about how the entire LAMP stack worked + a lot of tricks and theory behind how to make things secure (PHP had very few safeguards back then). I'm still reaping the benefits of a lot of this knowledge to this day.

I have moved on to other languages like JS and Python since ~2012. Looking at the article, I feel like modern PHP is almost a completely different beast compared to when I used it back then >_<

kodemager• 5 years ago

In a world where everything is fast becoming a JavaScript front end with “some” backend and with the improvements PHP has seen in recent years I don’t see why you’d consider yourself a “lowly” php developer.

I’m mainly a C# guy myself as far as the backend goes, but I don’t view PHP as being bad in 2022. I think people who do are stuck in the past to be perfectly honest.

It’s sort of like disliking JavaScript because it really sucked the soul out of you before typescript eventually made it nice to work with.

But being mad at any programming language is sort of silly isn’t it? If it works it works.

y4mi• 5 years ago

why you’d consider yourself a “lowly” php developer.

PHP has always been considered as a somehow bad language in all corporations I've worked at to date. The same applies to other script languages such as python, ruby or nodejs - but PHP was the most undervalued of them all.

It's kinda strange because the language is really performant and relatively easy to use.

Maybe that's exactly why the big brain architects don't like it. They do tend to love things correlated with pointless complexity after all

BoxOfRain• 5 years ago

I think unambiguously janky design choices like this[1] in PHP's early history is what's given it such a bad reputation, while it might be a decent language now such a reputation is hard to shake. I'll be honest the only time I'd reach for PHP over a comparable language with a less chequered history like Python is if I was dealing with a project that was already closely tied up in the PHP ecosystem.

[1] https://www.i-programmer.info/news/98-languages/6758-the-rea...

moonchrome• 5 years ago

I think people who do are stuck in the past to be perfectly honest.

I've recently tried to help out a friend who got stuck with a half-finished PHP project and a deadline to deliver, I have not touched PHP in 10 years and it still has the stench of a bad language from the get go - "modules" requiring VM config, "include" files ... what is this 90s ?

PHP might have had a huge patchwork competent people did to keep things working once projects using it grew enough, but coming back to it after 10 years it still felt like it was built on a foundation of shit.

vdo2• 5 years ago

Yes, sorry, I don't mean to make out php as this scrappy underdog or that we are under constant attack or anything... I see it more like, ummm, a pumpkin spice latte of languages, something viewed as a lesser choice because or in spite of its popularity? There are all these other amazing options, why pick this? Of course, with programming languages, you have many objective criteria where a coffee drink is totally subjective. Languages are also a huge investment time-wise instead of being able to try different flavors each day. Not a perfect analogy, but maybe you still see a little what I was going for as far as lighthearted stigma. PHP is and has been doing so well for so long, but I couldn't argue a huge case for it personally besides... it was there. It clicked at the time. I grew up with it.

I am balancing my love for it with the public perception I have seen over the years (fortunately I think much of the vitriol has waned sorta), in terms of how bashful I feel whenever discussing anything coding-related as to not overstate what I know/do. Most people, I think, grow out of php, so I see myself as a bad stereotype in still using it. But it has done a lot for me in terms of confidence building, being able to make things, the creative process of turning nothing into something, even though admittedly if I'd picked a different language I could likely say the same. But as far as staying with it, I feel like I look lazy for it, it just does what I want it to do. I am grateful for it. I hope this made sense.

manigandham2• 5 years ago

The reason for PHP's hate is detailed in this great vintage article: https://eev.ee/blog/2012/04/09/php-a-fractal-of-bad-design/

That's from 2012 and many of the issues have been fixed since then, but it was the truth a decade ago and tainted the experience for many devs who have sine moved on to other languages.

midrus7• 5 years ago

I'm one of those web devs that tries everything under the sun, and I also happen to have worked for a lot of companies (more than a dozen already, I'm on my 40s).

Laravel is such a *joy*. I've never had this feeling of using something so easy and productive. I've been recently building a side project with LiveWire and oh-my-god. I really wish I had discovered it before. From the templating system (you get components out of the box! no more "includes" if you don't want to) to the validations, to the queues system... everything is so well integrated and so easy to use.

For the last decade I've worked mostly with Django and SPAs, I'm not going back to that any time soon. Django templates are extremely limited for nowadays requirements, and SPAs are 1000x more complex to build and maintain so in my opinion they're not worth the price/effort. I think Livewire, Hotwire, Unpoly, Htmx, etc are what 90% of web apps need.

psychoslave• 5 years ago

Did also plaid with Ruby on Rails, or even Sinatra, and how would your rank the dev XP compared to Laravel?

gjsman-1000• 5 years ago

Laravel and Livewire is the best-kept secret ever because everybody is too busy being biased against PHP.

fvavsc• 5 years ago

PHP was my first love. It still is. Professionally I have moved on to other languages. But whenever I have an urge to create something for personal use, PHP is always the most productive way to get it done. With Laravel, I can even make it look polished and put it on the web.

PHP is such a joy that I am really thinking about switching back to it for my day job.

distantsounds• 5 years ago

yup, same. started at like 16 and just never found a replacement for writing web apps that was as easy to pick up with lots of built in power. the documentation has always been _extremely_ helpful too, shout outs to the php.net team for making it so easy to learn.

progmetaldev• 5 years ago

In my experience, a lot of the hate that PHP gets is unjustified. I can only speak from personal experience, but most people I know that complain about PHP were just burnt out from dealing with other developers' code. Having such a low barrier to entry created many novice and hobbyist PHP developers to hit the market, and start producing terrible code due to not fully understanding software development practices. I know I never had an issue with PHP, and could get work done very quickly, but once I had to start working through other's spaghetti code it burnt me out and I moved on to other languages with a bit higher barrier to entry.

dncornholio6• 5 years ago

Hating on PHP almost feels like racism. All the arguments are biased or false. I always get sad after clicking on PHP articles on HN.

awestroke2• 5 years ago

I feel it's the opposite. Always a lot of people defending PHP in these threads, no criticism allowed. Gives a very misleading picture of the industry - in reality, PHP is not a loved language, it's below Powershell and just over C in the latest ranking[0] with 40% love / 60% dread.

[0] https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2021#technology-mo...

dncornholio6• 5 years ago

This only adds fuel to my argument. Yeah let's post a results on how people FEEL about a language. How is that objective?

I could argue 100% of the 40% of the people actually uses PHP and 100% of the 60% people don't even use it.

phaedryx• 5 years ago

I would argue that racism comes from ignorance and insecurity.

A lot of frustration with PHP comes from using it a lot (not ignorant) and not enjoying it. They want to be better programmers than they language would allow.

Granted, PHP has improved a lot since I last used it (2004). I think a lot of the arguments were true, but are no longer valid.

FriedrichN• 5 years ago

And juvenile programming language tribalism. You could compile hundreds of pages of ranting about any language and their ecosystem if you wanted to. Some people need to learn that just because you prefer one thing over the other it doesn't mean all the other things suck.

I also suspect a lot of the people complaining about X language/platform/ecosystem are not even using them in production environments judging by their very idealized view on building software.

vegai_• 5 years ago

All the arguments are biased or false.

All of them?

dncornholio6• 5 years ago

At the time of writing, 100%

darthrupert3• 5 years ago

You're perhaps joking, but victims of actual racism might not think that's funny.

dncornholio6• 5 years ago

I'm not joking and it's not supposed to bu funny. It's supposed to be confrontating.

Example: Someone saw some bad PHP code once in their lives and think all PHP code is bad. They saw someone say bad things about PHP so they think all PHP is bad. Or they think PHP is bad because they don't like how it looks.

rejn• 5 years ago

Wait, what, really? PHP has come a long way, but is still littered with bad design, weird syntax and trying to be a bad Java with no threads and worse scalability.

peterhil2• 5 years ago

Wow, Php almost catches up with majority of programming languages!

peterhil2• 5 years ago

Can't wait for:

  - Pattern matching in switch statements (done horribly wrong)
  - If, while, and switch expressions
  - Inferred type system
  - Consistent array method argument order
  - Actually usable higher order functions and reflection

Big reminder: Php is a fractal of bad design, and I intensely hated using it at work for many years. The only good thing in Php is Symfony2 framework.

https://eev.ee/blog/2012/04/09/php-a-fractal-of-bad-design/

TheCapeGreek• 5 years ago

Big reminder: Read beyond decade old articles. This is precisely the tired parroted line people in this post are talking about when they say they don't understand the modern hate.

Zababa3• 5 years ago

Sum types, too, since the enums are C enums.

fraktl• 5 years ago

You could have googled and hated better. Why bother trolling if you won't even give it 40 seconds of using search engines?

dreadnip2• 5 years ago

I'm glad the community around modern PHP is thriving, but filler articles like these are getting on my nerves. Reiterating a bunch of content that has already been covered extensively on the web in the past months (and in 10+ previous posts on your own blog), slapping a misleading title on it and filling it up with call-to-action's for your own personal video/newsletter/courses isn't good content. The author had some really good articles in the past, but this reads like fluff just to fill up his blog. Quality over quantity.

dotancohen4• 5 years ago

You're not wrong, but Brent's articles are just about the cream de la cream for PHP. I'm glad to see him on the HN front page. I've been coding in PHP since 1999, so I've seen the language evolve from not-Perl to what we have today. For maybe two or three years now I've relied on to Brent to bring me up to the newest state of the art without having to parse changelogs and release notes (which I usually get to around March or April, a few months after the yearly December release).

For those of us in the PHP industry, I feel that the most concise way to stay up to date is with Brent's commentary and the Jetbrains PhpStorm blog.

dreadnip2• 5 years ago

He wrote some decent articles before, and he might write some good ones in the future, but this right here, this ain't it.

Unlike other "x in 2022" articles (for example https://www.ncameron.org/blog/rust-in-2022-2/), this one doesn't actually give any insight into the future of the language. Not only that, but there is no original content in it. He's simply repeating what he's been writing about for the past year. Maybe he should've called it PHP in 2021? Oh wait, he already did that (https://stitcher.io/blog/php-in-2021) and it's eerily similar to this article. If there is nothing new to write about, why write?

I'm glad you bring up the PHP Annotated Monthly blog, it's a great resource and definitely one of the blogs to follow to keep up to date with PHP.

robinhood• 5 years ago

On the contrary, I appreciate the author trying to summarize something instead of having to go through the last 10 posts.

brentroose• 5 years ago

I’m the author, and I think you’re partially right.

This article wasn’t done (and I’m still going to finish it, a “looking forward” section is missing)

I published it to get some feedback from the occasional reader, which I do more often. You can see I haven’t tweeted or posted it anywhere, I wanted to wait a couple of days still; so it’s a little unfortunate it got picked up here so soon. Of course I’m happy with the positive reception overall, but I agree that it’s not done yet.

On the part of self promotion within my own content: that’s just the way I’ve been doing it for years. I don’t feel guilty about mentioning other things I’ve made that I’m proud of and what I believe are high value as well. So on that part I don’t agree.

I do appreciate the overall feedback though, thanks for taking the time to share it

snov5• 5 years ago

PHP was a pretty cool language back in the days. Bizarre (yet fast) stdlib and ugly syntax, but super quick to write web stuff, supported by every shared hosting.

Nowadays, it seems to mimic Java, while having inferior libraries, I'm not sure what's the advantage.

AdrianB1• 5 years ago

Maybe I am just too old and tired, but current PHP has nothing to do with original PHP, version by version it changed direction and the last versions are just yak shaving.

I strongly believe that a programming language should be stable over a longer period of time while bug fixes and behind the scene improvements are fine, but for the developer it should not be a moving target, the manual should not triple in size and developers that know very well version x-1 should have zero problems with version x. There is a huge cost of change and if some people don't care, real life does.

ChrisMarshallNY• 5 years ago

I use PHP for my backend work. I don't claim to be an expert, but I have been writing in it for over 20 years. I probably started by rewriting PHP-Nuke to emit actually valid XHTML (what a chore -never again). I've written a couple of CMSes in it, and many plugins.

I've done some fairly big stuff, in PHP.

Works a treat. Fast, solid, secure. Widely-supported, great way to have a high "bus factor," because so many people can understand it.

All that said, I never did really like the language. It has always been a necessary evil, for me.

dainiusse• 5 years ago

I havent used pho for 10+ years now, but the point is - the tools mostly don't matter. What matters is the result.

aarondf2• 5 years ago

A lot of people here have mentioned Laravel. I think one of the key things about Laravel is that the creator, Taylor Otwell, is only focused on Laravel. Imagine if DHH didn't ever have Basecamp (or 37 Signals) and only focused on Rails and the Rails ecosystem. The Laravel team now has several full time employees working on making the entire Laravel experience as painless as it can be.

Of course Taylor and the Laravel team have paid products, but they are all 100% focused on the Laravel ecosystem and developer experience!

Some of the things that the Laravel ecosystem has as first party packages / services:

Paid:

• Vapor - Serverless Platform. Run your vanilla Laravel apps on Lambda.

• Forge - Server Management. Builds Laravel ready servers on any cloud.

• Envoyer - Zero Downtime Deployment. Deploy your apps with push-to-deploy.

• Nova - Administration Panel. Completely code-driven admin panels.

• Spark - SaaS App Scaffolding. Basically a SaaS starter kit.

Free:

• Horizon - Queue Monitoring. Like Sidekiq

• Jetstream - App Scaffolding. SaaS starter kit with teams, invitations, api, etc.

• Echo - Realtime Events. Think Pusher, Socket.io, etc.

• Sail - Local Docker environment.

• Valet - Dev Environment for Macs.

• Mix - Webpack Asset Compilation. A sane wrapper around webpack.

• Cashier - Subscription Billing Integration. Stripe + Paddle.

• Dusk - Browser Testing and Automation. First party browser automation for tests.

• Sanctum - API / Mobile Authentication.

• Laravel Scout - Full-Text Search. Wrapper around Algolia, Melisearch, or full-text database searching

• Socialite - OAuth Authentication. Log in with GitHub, Google, etc. Dozens of community packages as well.

• Telescope - Debug Assistant.

That's all first party. It's unbelievable to me how many batteries are included. Then you start looking at the surrounding ecosystem beyond that and it gets even crazier.

Laravel as a community is an extremely welcoming place, and I have found that most people care deeply about their code and architecture, but don't pick each other to death on details that don't matter. I think all in all it's a pretty pragmatic group.

If you haven't checked out PHP lately because you think we're writing a file-per-page and FTPing them up somewhere, you should give Laravel a look.

jgilias• 5 years ago

Yeah, curiously, I think Laravel is just getting started in a way. Taylor seems to have a superb vision about what it is that he wants to achieve with it and in what way, and I don't think the 'rest of us' have fully grasped the 'end-game', and what the implications will be.

I mean, he took the most popular, but somewhat 'not cool anymore' backend programming language with a huge pool of developers, and proceeded to build _the_ way to build server applications with it. If that's not strategic brilliance, I don't know what is.

EDIT: For context. My exposure to Laravel is jumping into some projects and becoming productive in a day without prior exposure to PHP. Largely due to superb documentation and the batteries included approach.

aarondf2• 5 years ago

Yeah, curiously, I think Laravel is just getting started in a way.

That would be amazing. I agree, I think Taylor has good vision. His overriding principle seems to be "make people's lives easier," which makes for a pretty good ecosystem.

lowercased• 5 years ago

What somewhat more interesting is the marketplaces surrounding some of these. There's a marketplace of nova add-ons, some free, some paid.

Some of these are definitely given more love than others, of course. I'd probably pay for some extended 'dusk' package to provide a better experience overall, but... unsure there's enough of a market to justify that?

I recently learned that the 'envoy' stuff is already free in Laravel - envoyer seems to be a hosted SaaS built with it, but you can define your own 'envoy' stuff to run however you want. https://laravel.com/docs/8.x/envoy

JackWritesCode• 5 years ago

Love it, Aaron. I've always felt more confident using Laravel knowing that it's backed by a competent entrepreneur. These paid services ensure the longevity of Laravel. We've paid for Spark and Nova, and we have Vapor & Forge subscriptions.

weatherlite• 5 years ago

Rails has people who do it full time as well, AFAIK Shopify workers like Rafael Faranca and I'm sure there are quite a few others. Besides them Rails has an army of volunteer committers, its one of the bigger open source framework communities, and the commit distribution is much healthier than Laravel's: Laravel looks like a one man show compared to Rails. As for all these packages - Ruby has equivalents. It's hard to say what should come included in the framework and how opinionated Rails should be - many people think its already too opinionated.

synergy20• 5 years ago

As long as wordpress still holds 40% of the sites PHP will be a major language.

In my opinion, all the modern 'script' languages are now adding static-typing one way or another, to make they much robust(python's mypy, typescript,PHP, etc).

I will pick PHP for backend website development, I just want to avoid the async-node-js as much as I can as it's much worse than other options I feel.

Loeffelmann• 5 years ago

What's wrong with async node js? I think the async API is pretty good.

tored2• 5 years ago

PHP in 2022 has much going for it, the only dark clouds on the horizon is the increasing framework oligarchy within the PHP community, which may reduce innovation and foster a "one size fits all" culture.

thakobyan• 5 years ago

I have worked with many programming languages and what attracts me to PHP the most is the simplicity of its tooling.

PHP in 2022

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